Scraping the Barrel

One of the guys who comes along to my Two Headed Giant tournaments (need I remind you that the next one will have a DCI foil Vampiric Tutor up to be won) asked me for my thoughts on how to create a reanimation deck. So naturally I’m posting my answer on my blog :) Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

Firstly we need to determine what the decks game plan is pretty obviously this is:

Get big dudes into the graveyard

Get them into play via reanimation

Not die before getting to this point

Next we have to pick the colours for the deck, naturally we’re going to have to play Black to have enough reanimation spells to make the deck work. Lets examine the other colours counter clockwise.

Red, only brings us efficient creatures and burn, pretty pointless to the decks long term plan so lets keep moving.

Green gives us some good ways to not loose the game and will let us cast the game winning spells but doesn’t help us with the first part of the game plan.

White will help us not loose but really wont give us many options on advancing points 1 or 2.

Blue on the other hand, blue does everything. It helps us get fatties into the graveyard (Compulsive Research). Helps us draw our reanimation spells (Compulsive Research). Helps us not loose the game (Compulsive Research, ok, really all of the available counter spells). So lets settle on blue as our second colour.

To build deck you’ll need:
12 counter spells, at least 6 of the them need to be hard counter spells, and at least 6 of them need to cost 2 mana or less.

Ok deck looks ok, just are you aiming for animating your opponents creatures or your own? Also I’d recomend throwing in something like Blazing Archon as a creature to reanimate, its has to be dealt with, no questions asked.

Hmmm, I think I need more creatures. I’ve been using the deck analysis tool there to try out some scenarios, and it seems that whenever I cast compulsive research/careful study, I often don’t draw a creature, creating a problem. Any more recommendations?

Yeah, I’ll take that out. I didn’t know what to fill the counter gap with, and i wanted to keep the mana curve fairly nice. I might work off 11 counters and put something else in. Any ideas for another good counter?

ya, umm…the basic rules you gave up top were blunt and horrible. your creature descrptions were all wrong, or maybe out-dated. and for a basic reanimation deck, forget countering or using an enchants or spells that aren’t bringn creatures back from the grave. there is a creature that can do any spell/instant ability out there)